Turnitin and GradeMark

A Tool to Improve Academic Writing

UWS has adopted an educative approach to the issue of plagiarism by fostering ethical scholarship across the University which contributes to a culture of learning informed by values of integrity and academic honesty.

One aspect of the educative and preventative strategy is adoption of Turnitin, an electronic text matching system.

What is Turnitin?

Turnitin from iParadigms is a web-based text-matching software that identifies and reports on similarities between documents. It is also widely utilised as a tool to improve academic writing skills.

How does Turnitin improve academic writing?

Good academic writing is a skill that comes with practice and experience. The Originality Report is useful for editing papers that include excessive use of direct quotes and paraphrases. Academics find the Originality Reports useful as a tool to guide students in correct citation practices and highlight potential need for greater originality in student work. While this type of software can be used as a detection tool, it can also, more importantly, be used as an educative tool.

Students are encouraged to pre-submit their work to Turnitin and to make revisions on the basis of the Originality Report before final submission of their work for assessment.

Key benefits for students:

Encourages students to read their drafts before resubmitting

Encourages students to evaluate their papers for correct referencing and citation

Discourages last-minute assignment work. Note: An originality report will be available within a few minutes after the first submission or 24 hours for second and subsequent submissions.